Théodore Géricault

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The monomanies series by Géricault (1821-24) by Théodore Géricault. From left to right: Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, A Kleptomaniac, Military Obsessive, Monomaniac of Gambling and Monomania of Child Kidnapping

Success

His first major work, The Charging Chasseur, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1812, revealed the influence of the style of Rubens and an interest in the depiction of contemporary subject matter. This youthful success, ambitious and monumental, was followed by a change in direction: for the next several years Géricault produced a series of small studies of horses and cavalrymen. He exhibited Wounded Cuirassier at the Salon in 1814, a work more labored and less well received. In the nearly two years that followed he underwent a self-imposed study of figure construction and composition, all the while evidencing a personal predilection for drama and expressive force.

A trip to Florence and Rome (1816–17), prompted in part by the desire to flee from a romantic entanglement with his aunt, ignited a fascination with Michelangelo. Rome itself inspired the preparation of a monumental canvas, the Race of the Barberi Horses, a work of epic composition and abstracted theme that promised to be "entirely without parallel in its time". In the event, Géricault never completed the painting, and returned to France.

The Raft of the Medusa

Gericault continually returned to the military themes of his early paintings, and the series of lithographs he undertook on military subjects after his return from Italy are considered some of the earliest masterworks in that medium. Perhaps his most significant, and certainly most ambitious work, is The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which depicted the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die.[1] The incident became a national scandal, and Géricault's dramatic interpretation presented a contemporary tragedy on a monumental scale. The painting's notoriety stemmed from its indictment of a corrupt establishment, but it also dramatized a more eternal theme, that of man's struggle with nature. It surely excited the imagination of the young Eugene Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying figures.

The painting ignited political controversy when first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819; it then traveled to England in 1820, where it received much praise. While in London Géricault witnessed urban poverty, made drawings of his impressions, and published lithographs based on these observations which were free of sentimentality.

Late work

After his return to France, Géricault was inspired to paint a series of ten portraits of the insane, the patients of a friend, doctorE. J. Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine, with each subject exhibiting a different affliction. The five remaining portraits from the series represent his last triumph. The paintings are noteworthy for their bravura style, expressive realism, and for their documenting of the psychological discomfort of individuals, made all the more poignant by the history of insanity in Géricault's family, as well as the artist's own fragile mental health. His observations of the human subject were not confined to the living, for some remarkable still-lifes, painted studies of severed heads and limbs, have also been ascribed to the artist.

Géricault's last efforts were directed toward preliminary studies for several epic compositions, including the Opening of the Doors of the Spanish Inquisition and the African Slave Trade. The preparatory drawings suggest works of great ambition, but Géricault's waning health intervened. Weakened by riding accidents and chronic tubercular infection, he died in Paris in 1824 after a long period of suffering. His bronze figure reclines, brush in hand, on his tomb at Père Lachaise, above a low-relief panel of the Raft of the Medusa.